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The Licking Heights Board of Education voted 5-0 last night to sever its ties to the Licking County Educational Service Center, which provides services, such as special-education programs, curriculum support and teacher training, to several school districts.

The move takes advantage of a new state law that gave districts until March 1 to decide whether to switch Educational Service Centers or wait another year.

The vote allows the Licking Heights school district to move forward as it completes its new contract with the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio, which serves 25 school districts in Franklin, Delaware and Union counties.

There are 56 ESCs across the state that allow districts to pool resources to save money on common services.

Licking Heights Superintendent Philip Wagner said the move will save the district money. Wagner said the district could even receive back about $55,000 a year as part of its state financial assistance for the service center’s work.

“It’s just kind of a rebate — it comes back to us,” Wagner said.

Licking County ESC Superintendent Nelson McCray said Licking Heights represents about $1.4 million of its $11 million budget. The ESC employs about 20 people who work for Licking Heights, including school psychologists, speech therapists and a curriculum expert. The ESC has about 200 employees in all.

There should be no disruption or increased cost to the remaining nine districts, McCray said.

But a member of the Licking County ESC board fears that the Licking Heights move could be felt all around the county.

“This has just confounded me, as it has a lot of people,” said Dean Ramsey, 81, of Pataskala, a 35-year board member of the Licking County ESC.

The move, Ramsey believes, could cost the remaining nine Licking County school districts — including Newark, Lakewood, Granville and Heath — more money to provide the same services, since the economies of scale will be lost.

The new law could set off a chain reaction of ESC consolidations across Ohio “to protect themselves from being gobbled up,” Ramsey said. “I think we’ll find that we will have to grow. That’s the future, I suspect. And that’s being investigated right now.”

Ramsey said Licking County ESC is exploring consolidation with ESCs in Fairfield, Knox and Muskingum counties.

With a budget of about $96 million a year, the ESC of Central Ohio is about nine times the size of the Licking County ESC. Though it hasn’t added any new member school districts since Franklin, Delaware and Union counties consolidated ESCs in 2008, its budget is up by about $30 million since then.

Some of the growth was the result of new programs, but most of it was from school districts “leveraging” the ESC to provide more services, said Bart Anderson, superintendent of the ESC of Central Ohio. Services to special-needs students account for most of the ESC’s expenditures, he said.

Licking Heights and the ESC of Central Ohio have a draft contract, and a final contract should be signed before the start of the new school year in the fall, Anderson said.

He expects the transition to go smoothly.

“They’ve done a really comprehensive analysis of what their needed services are and how they match up against the services we provide,” Anderson said.